FBI Director: Cybercrime will eclipse terrorism

TORONTO — Several arrests have apparently been made following an RCMP counter-terrorism investigation in Ontario. No details have yet been released, but Toronto community leaders have been invited to a briefing. The 2:30 p.m. background briefing was to be followed by a news conference near Toronto’s Pearson airport. In recent years, police have made a point of briefing community leaders before announcing terror arrests.

The FBI did not know that deceased Boston Marathon bomber suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev went on a six-month trip to Dagestan and Chechnya, Russia in 2012 because his name was missp

A 61-year-old French man was arrested at Philadelphia International Airport and charged with impersonating a pilot after airline officials found him in the cockpit of a plane scheduled for takeoff, police said Friday. The crew of a US Airways flight bound for West Palm Beach, Fla., found Philippe Jernnard of La Rochelle, France, in the jump seat behind the pilot on Wednesday evening, removing him after he was unable to produce valid credentials and became argumentative, police said.

Canada has become the first NATO country to officially designate the Taliban as a terrorist organization, the government announced on Wednesday as it also sanctioned the Haqqani network. The armed Islamist groups are responsible for countless attacks in Afghanistan that have slowed the country’s transition out of lawlessness following years of civil war, brutal Taliban rule and al-Qaeda intrusion.

One of the few clues issued by the RCMP as to the provenance of a foiled plan to attack Via Rail trains in the Toronto area was that it was assisted by “al-Qaeda elements in Iran,” RCMP assistant commissioner James Malidza told reporters on Monday.

Editor’s Note: Michael Wiseman is a managing partner of the Financial Institutions Group at Sullivan & Cromwell LLP. This post is based on a Sullivan & Cromwell LLP publication. The past decade has seen a surge in the number of cases brought against financial institutions and other major corporations under the Anti-Terrorism Act, 18 U.S.C. § 2331 et seq. (“ATA”).